Palazzo Previtera and SARP: Art and Hospitality on the Slopes of Mount Etna
In Linguaglossa, Alfio Puglisi’s project brings together a historic residence transformed into a museum-like hotel and an international artist residency, connecting contemporary art, landscape, food and the memory of the territory.
The first thing I thought when I entered Palazzo Previtera was that I could not possibly have been anywhere but Sicily. It felt like stepping into a domestic interior from another era, with wooden and mother-of-pearl headboards, hand-embroidered cushions, family portraits lining the walls, books dating back centuries and even a private chapel. It was like entering a place that does not simply evoke Sicily, but truly belongs to it. A house of a kind that has almost disappeared, with a suspended atmosphere steeped in layers of time. And yet, at the same time, it is entirely contemporary: equipped with all the comforts of the twenty-first century and filled with contemporary artworks that bring those same rooms firmly into the present.
Palazzo Previtera was once the country residence of the Previtera family, originally from Arcireale, who for generations have cultivated vines, orange trees and hazelnuts in Linguaglossa, a small town set at an altitude of around 500 metres on the northern slopes of Mount Etna. Since the seventeenth century, the family has played an active role in the area’s economic, cultural and agricultural history. The engineer Antonino Previtera, for example, made an important contribution to the development and promotion of viticulture on Mount Etna and, in 1968, founded the Etna Ragabo DOC, helping to strengthen the reputation of the region’s wines, which are now known and appreciated well beyond Sicily.
The story of the Previtera family is one that, through generations and transformations, has never lost its connection to the land. It is precisely from this legacy that Alfio Puglisi, Antonino’s great-grandson, began when, after completing a PhD in Political Economy in London, he chose to return to Sicily and give new form to a family history that was also his own. His project brings together contemporary art, hospitality, wine and cuisine, asking how a place can be experienced and narrated in the present without losing what makes it unique.
In Linguaglossa, Puglisi brought his family’s spaces back to life, transforming them, after a meticulous twelve-year restoration, into places open to the contemporary. Palazzo Previtera is now a hotel, a gallery and, in a sense, a lived-in museum. Just a short distance away, a former agricultural building once used for drying hazelnuts has become the home of SARP – Sicily Artist in Residence Program, the artist residency founded by Puglisi in 2019. It is a residency that does more than simply offer artists a quiet place to work, far from the noise of the major centres of contemporary art: it asks them to engage directly with the place in which they find themselves.
Installation View, Leo Orta. Terra Etna, SARP Residency. Photo Lorenzo Arrigoni
Installation View, Leo Orta. Terra Etna, SARP Residency. Photo Lorenzo Arrigoni.
The selection of artists begins with their interest in the landscape and the transformations that shape it. During their time in Linguaglossa, the artists immerse themselves in the territory and incorporate it into their research: they observe Mount Etna, its geology, its vegetation and the changes that continually reshape its appearance. Lava stone becomes the material for Leo Orta’s sculptures, while Etna’s red earth forms the basis of ceramics by Santiago Alvarez and Luis Gabriel Sanabria. The geography of the area enters Matthew Attard’s images and inspires the work of painter Silvia Giordani, whose exhibition at SARP is currently on view until 29 September. The aim is not to bring contemporary culture to Sicily, but to create the conditions for the territory itself to generate it.
I encountered the same approach at Palazzo Previtera, where the relationship with the land is literally embedded in the architecture and materiality is not treated as a decorative element added afterwards. The palazzo stands on lava flows dating from 1180 and 1500, which resurface around the swimming pool and throughout the garden, once a lava-stone quarry and now also the source of some of the herbs and aromas used by Previtera Kitchen, the hotel’s restaurant led by Japanese chef Kaita Osumimoto. Guests dine beneath lava-stone arches, while traces of the 1180 eruption remain visible, incorporated into the walls.
The menu — conceived as a journey through experimental cuisine — avoids any didactic references or obvious fusion between Sicily and Japan. Instead, it begins with what the land itself has to offer and uses it to create something new. Citrus fruits, herbs, flowers, vegetables, fish and meat tell the story of a Sicily that is not reconstructed through traditional recipes, but through its raw ingredients. It is an approach to cooking that, much like the work of the artists in residence, does not treat the territory as a collection of images to reproduce or consume, but as something to observe, understand and reinterpret.
In a sense, art, hospitality, wine and cuisine are all different ways of entering into a relationship with a place and telling its story to those who come from elsewhere. Wine speaks of the soil, cuisine translates its ingredients, architecture preserves its memory, while artists observe its transformations and try to imagine its future.
In my own experience, the world of hospitality — and, in a different way, that of certain artist residencies — runs the risk of constructing images of places rather than creating real opportunities to understand them. The project that brings together SARP and Palazzo Previtera seems to move in the opposite direction: allowing people to inhabit a history without turning it into a nostalgic or polished image of the past, and letting a new idea of the present and the future emerge precisely from that history.
Elena Caslini (born 1991) is an art historian and independent journalist. After completing a master’s degree in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, she worked with international galleries and auction houses, including Gagosian and Christie’s. She also helped develop Galleria Tommaso Calabro from its founding in Milan in 2018 until 2024.
For nearly a decade, she has written about art, culture and travel, covering exhibitions, artists and cultural destinations, and interviewing leading figures in the international art world. She enjoys discovering places where art and hospitality meet, exploring the relationship between creativity, place and cultural identity.
She contributes regularly to Vogue Italia, Il Giornale dell’Arte, PARNASS, La Gazzetta Antiquaria, Vanity Fair and By’s Magazine, and writes the Gallery Series column for Harper’s Bazaar Italia.
